Crimes against humanity, especially genocide, have been excluded from amnesty since the Nuremburg Trials. On a cultural level, oblivion by decree becomes an obligation to remember. This reversal is well-intended, but it opens up critical questions: Can memory be permanently established? Is it possible to maintain it in a monument?

The intervention at Track 17 at Berlin-Grunewald station, a work by architects Nikolaus Hirsch, Wolfgang Lorch, and Andrea Wandel on the site of the deportations from Berlin between 1941 and 1945, is an attempt that aims at a structural connection between memory and oblivion. Referring to Alois Riegl’s (the founder of the Modern Cult of Monuments ) differentiation between the specific, highly controlled documentary value, and the generic, always changing age value, the authors introduce a strategy that negotiates between stable and instable parameters: presumably permanent data, shifting vegetal successions, material durations and decay. This approach investigates whether it is possible to build ambivalence or even doubt into a monument. Thus, the uncertain status of the material memory becomes the focus of the intervention at Track 17.

The editors’ work includes the Dresden Synagogue, the Hinzert Document Center, a high-rise building in the geopolitical hotspot of Tbilisi (Georgia), and the highly debated Archeological Zone / Jewish Museum in Cologne.

Photos by Gerald Domenig and Lukas Roth

Contributors Alfred Gottwaldt, Nikolaus Hirsch, Susanne Kill, Wolfgang Lorch, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Diana Schulle, Andrea Wandel, Harald Welzer